


Relief

by stratumgermanitivum



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Cutting, Graphic Description, M/M, NSSI, Non-Suicidal Self-Injury, Pre-Relationship, Pre-Slash, Self-Harm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-21
Updated: 2018-12-21
Packaged: 2019-09-23 20:10:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,575
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17086931
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stratumgermanitivum/pseuds/stratumgermanitivum
Summary: The first time Will did it, he was fifteen, and it was curiosity.High school was awful for everyone, but it was a specific sort of awful when you were absorbing everyone else’s awful. Will felt overwhelmed, unbalanced. Other people’s emotions sat leaden in his stomach, twisted and warped and heavy.





	Relief

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings are there for a reason. Be safe. Drop down to end notes for detailed information.

The first time Will did it, he was fifteen, and it was curiosity.

High school was awful for everyone, but it was a specific sort of awful when you were absorbing everyone else’s awful. Will felt overwhelmed, unbalanced. Other people’s emotions sat leaden in his stomach, twisted and warped and heavy.

Carol-Anne Jenson was in his Biology class. She sat two tables up and one over, and she always wore long sleeves, even when spring fell over Louisiana in a hot, damp cloud. Will knew why, of course. It didn’t take empathy, everyone knew why. But he didn’t actually _see_ it until the school year was almost over, when she rolled up her sleeves the tiniest bit to wash her hands after a dissection.

Some of the scars were old, years old, even. Pale white and barely raised. Some of them were pink, crisscrossed over the old.

One was still fresh. Will had seen her slip the scalpel into her pocket the day before.

Carol-Anne met his eyes and he knew, he _knew_.

_This is the only thing that makes it feel better. This is the only way to calm down. This is the only thing that **works**._

And, well, he just wondered. He couldn’t help himself. Because Carol-Anne wasn’t the only one, she was just the most obvious. The one everyone could see from a mile away. But Will saw dozens of other students, and even the office secretary. And he _wondered_.

Will didn’t have to steal a scalpel. He had a dozen hunting and fishing knives at his disposal, and an empty metal home in a trailer park, alone all weekend while Bill Graham Sr. chased jobs and booze like he’d once chased skirts.

He’d prepared. Knife laid out across an old blanket. Bandages and antiseptic swiped from the nurse’s office. He’d poured a shot of vodka over his thigh and the knife to sterilize them both, and hesitated.

It was stupid. It was just about the dumbest thing he could have been doing, on a Friday night.

But other people whispered away in his head, voices soft and shaking. Will dragged the knife across his thigh before he could think about it any further.

Everything went silent.

There were no voices, no foreign emotions. Just the cut, thin and shallow and slowly welling up. There wasn’t even pain, not really. The Grahams kept their tools well-sharpened, and what little Will felt was more of a hint of burn than anything else.

And everything was so quiet.

Will cut another, then another. Then three more on the other thigh, to match. To balance. The first five were quick, but for the last he took his time. He drew the knife across his thigh in a careful line, slow enough that he could finally feel it. There were no words for the way his body lit up at the marks, all the focus there, as if every other nerve ending had suddenly gone dead.

When he was finished, he was shaking, knife clattering against the floor as he set it down. He showered and bandaged himself, and nobody else lived in his head for the rest of the night.

Three weeks later, he did it again. It was _blissful._

\-----  
It slowed down after college, although it never fully stopped. It dropped from once a week after every rough, crowded class, to only after the bad cases. But it never went _away_. It lingered in the back of his mind, a constant thrumming reminder that he could shut everything up if he just _did it_.

Will was aware he had a problem. A habit. An _addiction_.

It wasn’t like he had any illusions of being justified, or even ‘healthy.’ He knew what he was doing to himself. But it worked. It shut out all the noise, all the chaos. He could go from an overwhelmed, shaking mess, to complete peace. And all it took was a few shallow cuts.

And then the encephalitis took over.

He was losing time, losing his mind. His brain was burning away. He started carrying a pocketknife, razor-sharp and carefully cleaned. When he lost time, when the cases melted into his brain and he forgot who he was, when he saw Garrett Jacob Hobbs around every corner…

He would slip away, into a bathroom or down a hall, and slice. He stopped being ritualistic, stopped worrying about bandaging every cut. There wasn’t time. He needed to focus, needed to come back to himself.

The relief came shorter and shorter. Soon, the only time he felt alive was during the slice. Not even the rub of his clothing against his skin, agitating scabs, could focus him. Once the knife was away, everything cranked back up, loud and fuzzy.

He was losing control.

\-----

He was still bleeding when they stripped him in the hospital, and not just from Jack Crawford’s gunshot. He woke up chained to a hospital bed in short sleeves, with his arms wrapped in a thick layer of gauze. He hadn’t worn short sleeves in almost twenty years. It threw him almost as much as the restraints did.

Jack Crawford read him his rights, the second he was conscious enough to understand him. He stumbled over them. His eyes kept tracing over the bandages. Will couldn’t keep track of how often he’d been doing it, not with how much time he was losing, and he knew that beneath the gauze his arms were a morbid grid.

Hannibal hovered over Jack’s shoulder, but if he had any thoughts at all about the bandages, he never got to share them. Even men under arrest for murder could throw people out of their hospital rooms.

\-----  
Will was a danger to himself, the doctors said. He knew the right answers, knew what they looked for when releasing patients from psychiatric holds, but between the encephalitis and the murder charges, no one was trusting his judgement. Nurses ran fifteen-minute checks up and down the halls, even though Will was restrained by both soft medical cuffs and heavy drugs. If it weren’t for the drugs, he never would have gotten any sleep. He wasn’t sure how anyone else did it.

It started over again in the BSHCI, although at least there, he was able to stand up and stretch his legs. Later, they would move him to a concrete block in the bowels of the hospital, with access to the hospital’s understocked ‘library cart’ and staff pretending to give him privacy, but for the first two weeks, Will lived in a padded cell with a guard seated in the hall 24/7. He ate finger foods and was not allowed books until after the first 4 days, when somebody finally determined he wasn’t going to try and concuss himself with them.

Frederick Chilton tried to ask him about it. Asked if he cut himself to hide from the guilt of killing his poor victims. Asked him if he’d always been depressed, asked him how long he’d been suicidal. Asked a thousand questions that proved he didn’t know a damn thing about Will Graham.

Will was not suicidal. He never had been. He just found the quickest way to shut everything up. When Fredrick asked his stupid questions, Will shut his eyes and waded into the stream.

His arms itched for weeks, as the scars healed. Then they itched for the knife. Will ran his fingernails lightly over the pink and white lines whenever he could get away with it, and never dared any more than that. He would not go back to 24/7 watch.

\-----  
The first thing Will did, when he was released from the hospital, was go home to see his dogs. The second thing he did was attempt to shoot Hannibal Lecter.

The third thing he did was lay his kit out on the bathroom floor, like he had when he was a teenager.

There was no reason this time, no screaming voices, no heavy fog of someone else inside his brain. This time, it was only Will and the knife. Only the _need_.

He’d missed it. He’d _missed_ it. Like it was an old friend, like it was something he couldn’t live without. Like it was fucking _heroin_.

It scared him a little. Not enough to stop. Will’s arms itched like bugs were crawling over his skin. He sliced the feeling away and went back to long-sleeved flannels.

\-----

It came and went in bursts and flurries.

Randall Tier crumpled beneath his hands and Will forgot he’d ever bled. He let Hannibal bandage his hands and forgot about the open wounds beneath his jeans.

He went home from pretending to eat Freddie Lounds and sliced himself so badly that he was dizzy with it, burning and aching in hollow pulses.

The night before the dinner that wasn’t, Will took his knife to his chest in a desperate bid for clarity. He did not feel clear until Hannibal reached out and touched his face.

And then Hannibal sliced through him and it was nothing like the paper-thin burn of his own blade. It ripped and tore and _screamed_ through his body, thick and cloying.

Hannibal and Abigail and the violent _loss_ , and Will did not think he would ever be okay.

\-----

They kept him in the hospital again, 15-minute checks and therapists he saw right through, but this time, the 72-hour hold did not come with restraints. Will was not going to be getting out of bed any time soon anyway, and it was almost pleasant, a break from the crushing reality, from the knowledge that everything was gone.

\-----  
His arms itched on the boat. Will scrabbled for something, anything to hold onto. He bounced from clarity to haziness, from forgiveness to reckoning.

He needed it. Here, in the salty spray of the ocean, chasing Hannibal, he felt better than he had in a long time. Chasing Hannibal felt _right_.

He still needed it.

Will held his knife with an uneasy, unsteady hand, and tried to remember what it was like not to need it. He tried to remember the fleeting moments, before the encephalitis, before Hannibal, before Jack. Stretches of weeks or even months where he could set it down and walk away. Alone with his dogs in his quiet home, light on the sea.

He was an addict. He was losing control.

Will pitched the knife into the sea and itched for the rest of the trip.

\-----

The gunshot ached in a fuzzy, half-hearted way. Will’s head lolled onto Hannibal’s shoulder as Hannibal hoisted him into the tub.

“Creepy, H’n’bal,” He mumbled.

“Just freshening up for dinner,” Hannibal promised. There was something in his voice, a dull ache that radiated through Will, even in his haze. Will was tempted to offer him a knife, for his own use this time, rather than Will’s.

Hannibal was gentle as he bathed him. He didn’t linger, didn’t take advantage of the drugs in Will’s system. Will drifted in and out, but he jerked ineffectively when Hannibal’s fingers traced over the thickened, scarred skin over his wrists. “Don’t,” Will said, too loud in the echoing room.

Hannibal hesitated.

“Can touch it,” Will amended, struggling to focus on Hannibal’s hazy form. “But don’t… No c’ments. No ‘conv’sation.’ S’mine. Don’t wan’ your ‘help.’”

Will lost time again, after that, but he thought, as he was buttoned into his shirt, that he felt the butterfly wings of a kiss across those same scars.

\-----

“It’s a good thing I only need your face,” Mason Verger said, as Cordell rolled Will’s sleeves up – For dinner, they claimed, but Will knew it was to expose him. He didn’t care. Couldn’t. Everyone had seen his scars already, anyway.

“You’re pretty fucked up, aren’t you, Mr. Graham?” Mason continued.

Will took a chunk from Cordell with his teeth and later, when it was all over, felt the bitter resentment that he hadn’t had the chance to bite into Mason as well.

\-----  
The first time Molly saw them, she gasped. She hadn’t meant to, and he could tell she was embarrassed and shamed by her own response, but she couldn’t take it back, and Will would think about it every time they were naked together.

Mostly, it was scars, lines across his arms, his thighs, one deep across his chest. But there were new ones. Far fewer than there could have been, at least. Will had dropped down to one per session, just enough to push him through. Forgetting, as difficult as it was, was helping. Forgetting Hannibal, forgetting Jack, forgetting the sting of regret and hopelessness. If he pretended it wasn’t happening, he only truly needed the knife in his dreams.

But he could not stop entirely, and he could see the concern in Molly’s eyes, the not-quite-understanding.

She bandaged his wounds, she didn’t force him into therapy. Some weeks, he could even go without, lose himself in the normalcy of her, of her son, of their marriage.

But it always crept back in, always drew him back. He never stopped itching, and over time, he watched it wear Molly away.

When he left her in the hospital, he wondered if she would finally be able to relax.

\-----

The fall had ended with a burst of pain, the shock of the icy cold, the burn of salt in every wound. For a moment. Then, nothing.

Will woke to a hand clutched in his, to Hannibal watching him with such open longing that it made him ache. Ache, but not itch. He also woke to Hannibal’s thumb stroking over old scars.

“It’s not going to get better overnight.” Will’s voice was raspy, sore. Hannibal held a cup to his lips and he drank it down in short, tiny gulps, until Hannibal pulled it away again.

“I would never assume.”

Will stared down at his arms, at the overlapping patterns. “I don’t want you to try and ‘cure’ me.”

“All I ask is that whatever you do, you don’t do it alone. Anything else will come in time.”

Will shrugged. He could live with that. “Promise you’ll never ask me why.”

“I don’t have to.”

And that was probably true. Just as Will didn’t have to ask Hannibal ‘why.’ Why murder? Why cannibalism? Why the sensual embrace of violence, why the world spun too fast when they were apart?

Hannibal reached out. Some of the scars dulled the feeling, but the tip of his finger found the edge of a fresher wound. Will should have winced and sighed instead. “These are all older,” Hannibal said quietly, “You have one or two that may be from the past week, but the rest are in various stages of healing.”

“Didn’t have time,” Will whispered. Then, more honestly, “Didn’t need it.”

“You cut to shut out the world,” Hannibal mused.

Will grinned, feral and as sharp as his knife. “Nothing left I wanted to shut out.”

It was not over. It would never be over. Will would go through stages, through leaps and bounds of progress, and then through steps back into old habits. Sometimes he would go to Hannibal, and they would talk. Sometimes he would go to Hannibal, and Hannibal would watch and patch him up afterwards.

His head never echoed with remnants of Hannibal. Rather, Hannibal fit perfectly into a space already carved for him. The temptation ebbed. It never truly faded, and it never would.

But it was manageable, and that was good enough.

 

**Author's Note:**

> This fic contains graphic descriptions of cutting. It also contains discussion of cutting from someone who understands, logically, that they have a 'problem,' but does not necessarily _agree_ with that statement. Therefor, the self-injury is not necessarilly portrayed as negatively as some people may prefer it. Let me be clear: There is nothing good or positive about cutting. There are better solutions. But this fic is not here to teach you about those solutions.
> 
> This fic is here because I needed it to be. If you don't like it, that's fine. If you think it's out of character, you're probably right, and that's fine too. If you think you need to tell me either of those things, kindly fuck off.
> 
> This fic was written because I am in a bad place, and I need to write. This fic was _posted_ in case anyone else in a bad place feels better reading about other people going through the same thing, like I do. But it's really fucking triggery, and it's not particularly good, and I just... Do not have the energy to care. I wrote it because I needed it, and it helped. If it helps someone else, good! Otherwise, it'll just be another title on my list, oh well. 
> 
> This is my therapy fic. Please, _please_ don't critique my therapy fic. Don't even tell me about typos and spelling errors. If you need to chat, I'm here. If you want to comment, I'm here. If you want to offer 'suggestions' on how to fix things... please don't. 
> 
> _If I get it all down on paper it's no longer inside of me, threatening the life it belongs to._  
>  _And I feel like I'm naked in front of a crowd, 'cause these words are my diary, screaming out loud_  
>  _And I know that you'll use them however you want to._ \- Breathe (2 A.M.), Anna Nalick


End file.
